


These Days Have Made a Change In Me

by ofinfinitesspace



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Future Character Death (mentioned), Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani Needs a Hug, Mild Angst, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:55:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29803944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofinfinitesspace/pseuds/ofinfinitesspace
Summary: Nile's been with them so little time and Joe is overwhelmed by how much he loves her. It feels much like he remembers it felt when his wife had first brought him their child so many lifetimes ago: a figment of his imagination suddenly real, alive and precious. She makes him feel ancient. He doesn’t remember twenty-six anymore than he remembers infancy. He’d been married by then, his children walking and talking. But twenty-six or not, it’s those children Joe thinks of when he looks at Nile.--In which Joe has a lot of feelings about families, and his family in particular.That's it, that's the fic. I think my first headcanon in this fandom was that Nicky had been a good priest, followed almost immediately by the headcanon that Joe had been a good Dad.  Which got me thinking about what Nile joining the team might mean to Joe in particular.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 8
Kudos: 80





	These Days Have Made a Change In Me

**Author's Note:**

> This fic overlaps in time with the first chapter of I Believe; Help Thou My Unbelief, but they both stand on their own - just the same terrible road trip from different perspectives. 
> 
> Title is from Josh Ritter's Time is Wasting, a song that isn't even a little bit about what this fic is about, but it's a great line. 
> 
> The usual disclaimers apply: I'm white, I'm not Muslim, I'm not 1,000 years old. I still have not seen this movie.

_I shook his hand_ , Joe seethes as he pulls the car onto the M4 bound west.It felt impossible to believe and the only possible outcome. He’d wanted to punch his teeth out. He’d wanted to wrap his arms around him and never let go. So the part of him that always sought the middle, but rarely found it, had shook his hand and said only, “take care of yourself, Baz” before stalking back to the car. And that was _not_ what he’d wanted.

Now Nicolo’s thumb stroking the back of his neck might be the only thing keeping him within a reasonably safe margin of the speed limit.

Three house later, when he is forced to stop for gas, Nile offers to spell him. He feels like he could drive forever, chasing the steadiness driving forces on him. He’s leaning against the car, stretching out his back, when Nico comes to him. “I’ll sit with her,” he says in a tone that suggests he’ll brook no argument, “you should try to get some sleep.”

He knows it’s the right thing to do. He is exhausted and what are they going to do, wake up Andy? She needs all the sleep she can get and probably will only get it if she’s tricked into by a moving car. But he also finds he’s suddenly jealous of the idea of anyone else being on the other side of Nico’s intent attention. Not that he hasn’t had it for the last three hours, had Nicolo holding him together in the palm of his hand.

There is a roaring in his chest that he doesn’t understand, but feels familiar. Like most things loud and awful in his life, it was quieter when Nico was close. But now, it threatens to spill out of him.He slides into the middle seat, shifting the piles of swords and road trip detritustowards the windows as quietly as possible. But Andy sleeps like the dead. ****

He wants to gather her close to him, remind her that they are people through other people, that even if she is the only one bearing this particular burden, she isn’t alone. But it feels like there are a thousand miles crammed into the two inches between them.

It’s been like this before - he spend years chasing her up and down the coast of Britain, pulling her out of the North Sea and letting her huddling in his arms while her heart was miles away, miles below. And when frostbite receded, she was off again. And he followed, because eventually she always come back to him.

She always comes back.

And when he thinks about what happens when she doesn’t, when he won’t be able to just pull her out of the sea, the roaring crescendos. So he reaches across two inches anda thousand miles to thread his fingers into her hair as she lolls her head into his shoulder. And eventually, he does sleep, with Andy’s head warm under his hand, lulled by the near-silent click of Nico’s rosary beads and the way his breathing changes when he prays.

It’s after dark when he’s behind the wheel again: he appeased Andy by letting her navigate and banished Nico and Nile to the backseat to get some rest. They are still hours from the safe house when they whiz past Glasgow. He’s tired and sore, but nearly everything he holds dear is in that car and driving keeps the roaring quieter.

In the backseat, Nico is curled up into the window, the leather jacket Joe had left in the backseat shoved under his head, but he stares out the window. Beside him, Nile sits bolt upright but seems to be asleep. Joe isn’t sure how that’s possible, but she’s already proven herself something of a marvel.

She’s been with them so little time and Joe is overwhelmed by how much he loves her. It feels much like he remembers it felt when his wife had first brought him their child so many lifetimes ago: a figment of his imagination suddenly real, alive and precious. She makes him feel ancient. He doesn’t remember twenty-six anymore than he remembers infancy. He’d been married by then, his children walking and talking. But twenty-six or not, it’s those children Joe thinks of when he looks at Nile.

He knows, of course, that she isn’t a child. She has shown over and over in such a short time that she is strong and capable and decisive; once she’d chosen, she’d thrown herself full body into being one of them. That was when the roaring had started, somewhere between when she leapt out the window and before she hit the ground, when it was too late to stop her and too late to catch her.

It’s not that he doesn’t think she can take care of herself. She has the same powers they do and he’s seen her in a fight. She was the one doing the rescuing back in the lab and he was the one being rescued, after all. But she makes him want to wrap spells of protection around her and these - a hand on a back, arms arounds shoulders, lips pressed to a forehead- are the only spells he has. She’s held herself apart from them, a little, even after the lab. She’s been polite and helpful and kind, even warm. But after centuries of living out of each others pockets, she makes Joe notice just how on top of each other they all are. And he’d found himself, in the few quiet moments they’d had all together, wanting to turn toward her, to reach out and pull her into them.

When he glances in the rearview mirror to change lanes, Nile is no longer upright but tucked into Nicolo's body as he leans back against the door. The leather jacket is draped over them and one Nico's hands reaches up to cradle Nile’s head against his chest. He watches a little too long and the roaring swells.

He’s not jealous now, at least, not of Nile. He’s spent enough of his own worst nights in those arms to know the comfort that can be found there and he’s glad that Nile can have that now. He just wishes…He’s never been anything but grateful for what he’d been given, this ragtag band of siblings stumbling toward family by force of will. He’d almost forgotten that there was another kind fo family to have. But watching Nile rest in Nicolo's arms reminds him that there was a time when his world was small enough to wrap his arms around.

All his memories of his first life are hazy, but the early days of his child's life are sharper, perhaps because they had been so hazy in the living of them. He remembers months in which no one slept much and everyone cried, a lot. He always felt wrong footed and in the way, like everything he tried to do to help only made more work for his wife who was rising much more gracefully to the challenges of motherhood.

Home had not been a place he’d wanted to be much. He had been very young, when his father had explained _far away_ and the work the men of his family did there. And as long as he could remember, he chafed at routine and craved newness. And while he was always eager to learn new things, he might have been just as eager set aside the ones which did not come naturally.

But unlike almost anything else he’d tried his hand athis early stumbling in parenthood only made him more desperate to be good at it. So he tried harder.

And to he utter shock, he got better. Sometimes the baby didn’t cry when he picked her up, sometimes the baby stoping crying when he picked her up. Sometimes, the baby _laughed_. And more and more, he found that home was the only place he wanted to be.

His sister married and he found in her husband an eager and competent apprentice. Soon he was only on every other journey and then every third. The days that he did spend on the road were long and dull and exhausting. The days at home are no less exhausting but they glittered like the far away bazaars used to.

And then the child got sick and he gave up the trade routes to his brother-in law-entirely. And when the child got better, he did not take them back. He started a garden and made friends with the sellers in his own market. He reveled in every new and tiny thing the child learned. He spent long evenings sketching his wife in the fading light and relearning how to make her laugh. His world contracted toonly what he could reach out to touch, and he was the happiest he’d ever been. But then word came of invading armies and there was this roaring in his chest.And so, with great reluctance, he left home again.

The rest, as they say, was history.

At the start, he would have given up everything to return to a home he knew was not longer waiting for him. Now, a thousand years later, Nicolo is his home and he would give up everything to never have to leave.

As a young man, he had loved the open road with his whole heart and now, as an extremely old man, he loves waking up at the same time everyday, preferably in a bed **.** And Nico. With his whole heart he loves a man who loves justice, worse he loves a _patient_ man who loved justice and is determined to bring it about, one bullet at a time if necessary.

It had not taken much for Nicolo to convince him that “for good” was the only way to use their powers: he spoke about destiny like its as a challenge to be met. But underneath the roaring, there is an ache for a quiet kind of life he almost had: for a garden and a roofand a child. And if he might have sometimes quietly grumbled about an early morning or a hard floor or a draining mission, Nico would kiss him and remind him that to whom much is given, much will be required.

And he has been given so much. _This_ is the family he’s been given, where no one is a parent and no one is a child and they hold each other up and hold themselves together. And if Andy dying feels like the sun is going to go out, it wouldn’t be the first time they have orbited an empty space for a while. But there is the roaring in his chest.

He cannot be a father to Nile because she already has one, one she likely isn’t looking to replace. He cannot promise to keep her safe because that has always been the limit of his power. So as he drives through the dark hills of the highlands he tries to recalibrate his heart: toward sibling, toward comrade, toward friend.


End file.
